The Official Website of Hard Driving: The Wendell Scott Story by Brian Donovan

Brian Donovan, an investigative journalist and amateur racing driver, has won numerous honors in both pursuits.

As a reporter for Newsday, the Long Island and New York City newspaper, Donovan collected more than 40 journalism awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting.

He won the Pulitzer in 1995 for a series of articles written with colleague Stephanie Saul that revealed a costly pattern of disability-pension scams by Long Island police. He also shared in Newsday’s 1970 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, writing many of the stories in the government-corruption project that won the award.

Donovan’s other awards include several of the most prestigious in journalism. He has published articles in magazines ranging from The New Republic to the Investigative Reporters & Editors Journal and in newspapers across the country. He has broken exclusive investigative stories from Central America to the South Bronx. His prize-winning reporting includes projects exposing racial prejudice, oil-industry and CIA abuses, organized crime, misconduct and waste by public officials, corporate financial scandals, and child abuse in daycare programs.

Donovan knows from long personal experience the addictive lure of auto racing, a central theme in Hard Driving. Driving Formula Vee racecars on the EMRA Vanderbilt Cup circuit, Donovan has won dozens of races on tracks from West Virginia to Canada. He has won an EMRA season championship and a track championship at Pocono Raceway in Pennsylvania. He holds the EMRA track record for his class at Nazareth Speedway, one of America’s fastest one-mile ovals. A motorhead since age 11, he has built hot rods, racecars and motorcycles from the frame up.

Besides the Pulitzers, Donovan’s other national journalism awards include the George Polk Award for National Reporting, Columbia University’s Paul Tobenkin Award for reporting on racial and ethnic intolerance, the University of Maryland’s Casey Medal for journalism about problems that harm children, the John Hancock Award for Business & Financial Journalism, the Scripps Howard Foundation Public Service Award, the Investigative Reporters and Editors Award, the National Headliners Award, and an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellowship.